Mary Tudor (7 page)

You cannot imagine the grief of all the people at this abominable government. They are so transported with indignation at what passes, that they complain that your majesty takes no steps in it; and I am told by many respectable people that they would be glad to see a fleet come hither in your name to raise the people; and if they had any chief among themselves who dared raise his head, they would require no more …

[Letters and Papers … of the Reign of Henry VIII, VI, 1528.

The original, in French, is in the Vienna Staatsarchiv]

*
Elizabeth.

†
Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury.

3

TRAUMA

Over the next two years, Mary became an affliction to herself, and to everyone who had to deal with her. In February 1534, claiming that she was ‘nearly destitute of clothes’, she sent a gentleman of the household directly to the king, but since he was instructed not to receive anything unless she was addressed as princess, this was clearly a demonstration rather than a real request. At the end of March in the same year, when the household made a routine move to another residence, Mary refused to budge until she was properly addressed, so that the exasperated Lady Anne Shelton, who was in charge of the female side of the establishment, had her bodily dumped in a litter and carted off – shrilly protesting. This must have had its funny side, but no one at the time was amused.
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In September 1535, when the Bishop of Tarbes paid a formal visit to Elizabeth on behalf of the King of France, Mary had to be physically restrained from confronting him on the grounds that she was the only princess present, and his business should have been with her. Another furious row with Lady Shelton resulted. When Queen Anne came to visit her daughter, which she did quite frequently, Mary (unless she was kept out of the way) put herself about to behave as insultingly as possible, so that if Anne ever had it in mind to seek a reconciliation with this abrasive young woman – and there are some signs that she did – she was effectively deterred.
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Chapuys, while ostensibly praising such virtuous behaviour, became in fact more than a little anxious. After the Act of Succession in 1534, designating Anne’s offspring as the royal heirs, Mary was technically guilty of high treason, and so were any of the servants who subscribed to her point of view, publicly or privately. Henry might still be fond of his difficult child, but his patience was notoriously erratic and Thomas Cromwell, himself under threat, could not afford to be squeamish.

Apart from the occasions when she deliberately provoked her minders, Mary was not treated brutally, or even unsympathetically. Her health was fragile, due no doubt to the impact of stress upon an already unstable menstrual cycle, and frequent visits by the royal physicians are recorded, together with significant expenditure on medication. In March 1535, when she was recovering from ‘her usual ailment’, it was reported that:

… the Lady Mary, the King’s daughter, after she was restored to health of her late infirmity, being in her own house, was much desirous to have her meat immediately after she was ready in the morning, or else she should be in danger eftsoons to return to her said infirmity ...
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On medical advice, she was taking her main meal between nine and ten o’clock in the morning, which was not in keeping with the practice of the rest of the household. Nevertheless her preference was indulged, at an additional cost of £26 to the ‘diets’.

Except for those comparatively brief periods when some outburst had left her confined to quarters by her irate father, Mary seems to have taken regular exercise, riding or walking in the extensive parks that surrounded most of the royal residences. She was never, of course, unaccompanied, but this was less for restraint than to ensure that she was not removed by sympathisers who might have taken her overseas, where she would have been an even greater threat. Like her mother, she was extremely nervous of poison, but in that respect they both of them did the king a major injustice. Had Henry been willing to employ such methods, he could have saved himself a lot of trouble, but he was not. More serious perhaps (and this was something which worried Catherine a lot) was the risk of ‘contamination’. It would have been relatively easy for Cromwell to have involved her in a scandal with some male member of the household, and immensely damaging to her reputation. Her own scrupulousness would not necessarily have protected her, and it can be reasonably assumed that it was the king, rather than the harassed Lady Shelton, who protected her from any such attempt.

Much of what we know about Mary during the two and a half years that she spent in this joint household is derived either from the accounts or from Chapuys’ despatches. Consequently we know about her ‘rheums’, her ‘usual ailment’ and sundry neuralgias and other afflictions for which medicines were provided. We also know that the Imperial ambassador provided her and her mother with everything from ‘books of consolation’ to political advice. He was constantly in touch with Mary, and made endless and tediously repetitive representations to the council on her behalf.
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Chapuys was indulged because he represented a powerful master. Henry was again hankering after improving his relations with the Emperor, and only twice was goaded into telling the ambassador that his master should be encouraged to mind his own business. Most specifically, in September 1534 he instructed his own ambassador to tell Charles ‘… we think it not meet that any person should prescribe unto us how we should order our own daughter, we being her natural father’. Had the king really been aware of the extent and nature of Chapuys’ activities, he could not have failed to demand his recall. The ambassador was deeply involved with the English malcontents, and in September 1534 was actually discussing the possibilities of a rising in England, particularly with Lord Darcy and Lord Hussey – Mary’s former chamberlain.
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He did his level best to persuade Charles that this was a realistic prospect, and that ‘all good people’ in England would support it. The Emperor was unconvinced, but he did discuss with his council the possibility of supporting the Kildare revolt in Ireland, ‘considering the offers made by divers princes there to remain under the Emperor’s authority, and hold the country of the Queen and Princess’. Quite what this would have meant in practice is not clear, but for a couple of months at least intervention seems to have been a real possibility. However, it did not happen, partly because the rebels were not doing well enough for a mere token gesture to suffice. If the Irish were really going to overthrow Henry’s rule, then a serious commitment of troops would be called for, and that was quite sufficient to deter Charles from taking any action. Nor did anything happen in England, which is no doubt why Chapuys’ machinations went undetected. Catherine, in any case, had made it clear that she would be no party to insurrection. However good her cause, it was not to be defended in that way.

Mary was more biddable. She was keenly aware of the immense debt that she owed to the ambassador for his moral and practical support, and expressed herself in the warmest terms to Charles – her one-time fiancé. He was, she is alleged to have said, her real father, and she would never consider marrying without his advice and consent.
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In October 1535 she went further, writing (by way of Chapuys) to Gattinara, the Emperor’s chief minister, that ‘the affairs of this kingdom will go to total ruin if his majesty does not, for the service of God … take brief order and apply a remedy’. This was treason, as even the ambassador must have known, and indicates that had there been any equivalent of the Kildare rebellion in England, Mary would have been deeply involved, and if it had failed she would have lost her head.

The Emperor was in a cleft stick. Because of his permanently bad relations with France, and the threat from the Ottomans, to say nothing of the developing religious tensions in Germany, he needed English support, as he frankly admitted. On the other hand he could not contemplate doing anything prejudicial to the cause of ‘the Queen and Princess’. A bit of pressure in Ireland would have been acceptable, and if the English themselves (by whatever means) could have persuaded Henry to give up Anne and return to Catherine, he would have been delighted. But he had no desire to see Henry overthrown, nor England reduced to the kind of turmoil that would have rendered it useless as an ally in an emergency.

In May 1534 the Rota, the supreme ecclesiastical court in Rome, finally adjudicated Catherine’s appeal in her favour. This made not the slightest difference to the situation in England, but Catherine became more selfrighteous than ever in correspondence with her nephew. She explained at great length the horrendous sins of the English in general and of Henry in particular; both she and her daughter, she complained, were suffering the pains of purgatory. ‘I am as Job,’ she wrote, ‘waiting for the day when I must go sue for alms for the love of God.’ As she was sitting at the centre of a household that was costing her iniquitous husband nearly £3,000 a year, this was pure fiction.
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What both women did, partly out of genuine conviction and partly because it was politically convenient, was to blame Anne Boleyn for their troubles. Chapuys assiduously promoted the same view, partly because it gave a pretext for Charles to maintain diplomatic relations with Henry, and partly because he knew perfectly well that her political influence was pro-French. In truth Anne seems to have been largely indifferent to Catherine, whom she probably regarded as a spent force. Mary she both feared and disliked, but her influence over the king in that direction was limited. She may well have persuaded Henry to curtail his daughter’s liberty when she had been particularly obnoxious, but such restraints were always short lived, and the king’s anger with Mary was not because she had upset his queen so much as because her behaviour was making it impossible for him to treat her with the affection that he still felt.

Given the trouble that they were causing him, Henry behaved towards both women with considerable restraint. When the Act of Succession became law on 30 March 1534, it became high treason to refuse to accept Elizabeth as the king’s lawful daughter and heir.
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Henry knew perfectly well that both Catherine and Mary would refuse such an oath, so, in spite of some graphic threats, he would not allow it to be administered to them. Their servants were compelled to swear, and did so, much to Catherine’s disgust. She complained that that made them ‘rather gaolers than servants’, but it seems to have made no difference either to their diligence or to their loyalty to her. In her anger, Catherine was less than fair, and never showed any appreciation of the king’s forbearance towards her own person. There was also, of course, an element of self-interest in his attitude, because if he had proceeded to extremes against either of them, then even the deaths of Thomas More and Bishop John Fisher (who had both refused to accept Henry as supreme head of the Church) would have paled into insignificance beside the scandal that would have been created.

In 1535 Mary was nineteen, and in normal circumstances would have been married and preoccupied with the running of a great household. As it was, her scope was extremely limited. She had no responsibilities, public or private, and the physical exercise that she craved was inevitably restricted. As she was no great scholar, boredom was probably a serious problem. There is no evidence that she was receiving any systematic instruction, and no reference to exceptional piety or devotional exercises. Several years later, one of the ladies who had served her at this difficult time testified that it had been works of classical literature –
literae humaniores
– that had been her solace on sleepless nights, rather than books of spiritual guidance, but the lady’s memory was selective in other respects and we cannot be sure.
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Mary was under constant surveillance, but that was not for the purpose of monitoring her daily routine. Letters to and from Chapuys must have been privileged, because some of the things that she is alleged to have told him would have got her into serious trouble. His messages were carried by his own servants, and although Cromwell occasionally prohibited such visits, the bans were never of long duration. Correspondence with Catherine, which was surreptitious by necessity, may have escaped scrutiny, or may simply have been regarded as innocuous. Those letters that survive are full of affection and encouragement, but have no political significance. Letters from her mother’s friends and allies were, however, rather different, and there was a fuss in September 1534 over an exchange with Sir Nicholas and Lady Carew, which Anne Shelton was ordered to investigate.
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Following the final decision of his court in Catherine’s favour, Clement had ordered Henry to take her back upon pain of excommunication. When his ultimatum was ignored, the ban came into effect, although it was never fully promulgated, and neither Charles nor Francis broke off diplomatic relations. In December 1535 Catherine became seriously ill, and on 6 January she died at the age of fifty. In spite of all pleas, the king would not allow his daughter to visit her mother in her last illness, perhaps because he did not take the crisis seriously until it was too late. Inevitably there were rumours of poison, and it was briefly believed in Brussels that Mary was
in extremis
for the same reason; however, the real reason for Catherine’s death appears to have been coronary thrombosis. Mary was deeply distressed, particularly because she had been unable to say goodbye, but, contrary to what was believed in some quarters, Henry’s attitude (and possibly Anne’s as well) became more indulgent towards her. This was less for humane reasons than because they had both persuaded themselves that the old queen had been responsible for her daughter’s defiant attitude. The threat of the succession oath, which had been allowed to hang in the air since the summer of 1534, was now tacitly withdrawn, and the king sent her a substantial financial gift. All this was wasted upon Mary, sunk in grief at her mother’s death; she probably did not notice, and certainly did not care, that rather different signals were now emanating from the court.